T-Bird Anni Rides Again

Well, it’s lunchtime and so far I have been pretty productive!

I’ve finished the latest essay in 1,800 words give or take a few so I’m within 10% of the target and am as happy with it as I have been with the other 3.  So that’s now scattering it’s electons over the automated TMA system to my tutor a full 2 weeks early.  YES!! 

I got a phonecall a little while ago to say we don’t need to be where we are going tomorrow until 11am, not 10am as originally stated which makes all of tomorrow morning so much easier to deal with and we have food provided which is a bonus.

I’ve finished another pair of roughly size 13 - 1 socks so that’s 3 pairs in that size done and I’ll make a few more the same size to give choices (and allow for Aprilia to lose at least 1 pair whlist we are there!)

I got a letter today from the endowment company to say that they accept fault in selling me a life insurance product when I didn’t need one and have refunded me all the life insurance element of the policy to date.  It’s not a huge sum but it’s nice and as I’m going to bin the policy anyway it does at least mean that I get those payments back as well as the value of hte plan.  (note to self, write to terminate policy!) 

So this afternoon I will be aiming to carry on the same vein and do more swotting and a bit of domestic stuff then feel terribly accademically virtuous with a hint of Prairie Muffin by the time Aprilia gets back from Grandpas! 

A panic phonecall to a fellow Puddler in the next town who has a remarkably musical family produced a reply of "oh, hang on, I think I saw a small violin tailpiece on top of the piano the other day"  and yes, there it was!  Now obviously *everyone* just has that sort of thing dotted round don’t they   So we hotfooted over and now have a tuned up violin to play and Aprilia spent a few hours playing whilst me and B gossiped, er, no, I mean discussed important camp related issues and home education!

Other good stuff today has been making carrot muffins using a normal muffin recipe with OJ instead of milk plus 2 blitzed carrots, there wsa going to be a bit of spice in there but I only remembered when they were in the oven!   The toppign was "poorman’s orange curd" which tastes almost as good as the real thing!  Take a 1/3 cup of powdered milk, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup OJ and stir with a wire whisk in a pan.  ONce it’s all mixed up heat it up to a rolling boil (keep stiring) then add in 1/4 cup cornfour blended in a couple of tablespoons of water or milk.  It thickens up fairly quickly as long as you have everything boiling first.  It makes a good cake filler and topper and is good on toast too.

Tomorrow I am childless for a few hours so I’m planning on blitzing a bit more of the studying.  Aiming to finish the essay, it needs just a little fine tuning in the light of tutor’s comments from the last one and in the light of realising I’d missed off something really important in one of my asthetic catagories (like there were two people who pondered a definition for the Picturesque and I’ve only mentioned one )  After that I’m having another look at the exam topic sheet and starting off mind maps for all the topics to start filling in so I can make a better choice of topics once I’m ready to start revising.  Still think it’s rather odd this idea of being given topics in advance so you don’t need to revise the whole course but hey, I can live with it! 

Okay, not my most original or descriptive titles really!  I finally got round to tuning up Aprilia’s "new" violin today.  Was just coaxing the last string into tune when there was a twang.  So I looked to see which string had pinged (they are living on borrowed time by the looks of htem, it’s one reason why I’ve been delaying tuning it up!) only to find that it was the cord that holds the tailpiece onto hte body of hte violin that had snapped.  So now I am investigating the possibilities of using a zip tie to replace it as I refuse to go and pay someone to fix it as it will probably cost more to fix than it is worth.  So the chances of Frere Jacques at came are diminished (you can consider yourself reprieved!)

got back from Oulton to find that my previous essay had been marked and was ready to download from the OU website.  78% for this one with lots of lovely comments about well developed, wide ranging arguements and successful use of a sustained comparative aproach - comparing the 3 different texts with each other point by point rather than writing about each text seperately otherwise known as interweaving (or basketweaving depending on how bad tempered I’m feeling wtih the essay at the time!) 

So, now I just need to polish up the current one with a few bits and tips taken from her notes on the last one (historical context not being clear enough mainly - oops! it’s a history course!!!) and on to New Lanark Mills and changes in society and social reform. 

Hamilton being interviewed about how at Monaco you often brush (or kiss) the barriers round the circuit as they are just so damned close to the track remarked that he French kissed the barrier in practice when he crashed.  Cue 2 adults falling about with laughter at this wonderful new term to discribe stuffing your car into the barrier and 1 bemused child demanding what was so funny.  How *exactly* do you explain that one with your dignity intact

Essay still unfinished and I’m at Oulton tomorrow so I’m just going to push on with the rest of the course, do a bit of knitting and return to hunt for the remaining 500 words during hte week.  Hvae got til mid June to nail this one but I want to get back ahead so I can start working up revision stuff as we hvae the exam topic sheet now (yes I know how wierd that is, getting your topics in advance but the scope of this course is so wide that they take pity and give us some braod strokes to work within.)

I’ve written the grand total of 500 words in the last 2 hours.  a goodly chunck of which is quotes from our primary sources (which should get me a tick on the learning outcomes at least)  Only another 500 to find but all I have left is the conclusion….. 500 words concluding that Wordsworth is more influenced by ideas of beuty and the sublime whereas Havell is firmly in the camp of hte picturesque?  Bah, I’m sure I read somewhere that a short but detailed essay could get just as good a mark as one which was closer to the word limit….

cos I can never remember which of your e-mails it the best one to get you one!

do you want really long cuffs on your gloves or just "pulse warmers" and is it the mainly greens and blues one on the picture (having a dense moment on my left and right vs the monitor’s left and right as to which one you picked out.)

There is a post that has gone round some of the HE yahoo groups about how the mass school system was developed - the original article is here if you have been lucky enough not to read it yet but feel the need for a bit of not so light (or unbiased) reading on a Saturday night. Now, this got me thinking a bit, I mean, this is the time period I’m studying for the year with the OU so I have a few vague notions about the history of society at the time and even of the education system of the time within the UK (cos that’s the unit I’m reading this week….)

So let’s get it straight.  This bloke over in Prussia did not invent mass education.  His system is not the only educational system round the world that was in use at the time he was throwing tantrums about how his professionally trained soldiers had been whupped by a load of French farmhands.  It may well still be partially recognised in the 3 tier German system of education (Hauptschul, Realschul and Gymnasium) and also in the German attitude to going to school OR ELSE…. which incidentally was a law introduced significantly later (I beleive it was some short bloke with a mustash and a similar attitude to Napoleon about world domination that passed that particular law but that isn’t covered by the course i’m doing so don’t quote me)  

Those French farmhands had seen warfare of a pretty bloody kind for a good while by the time they got to Prussia having had that whole French Revolution thing where everyone was expected to fight for the greater good (for greater good read whatever Robspierre et al decided was the Rights of Man as Citizen that week) or get their head removed from the rest of them.  That tends to concentrate the mind of a soldier you know.  As does knowing that your Leader is a shortarsed despotic if charismatic tyrant (who ordered all the sick and injured of his own army poisoned rather than transported back to France after one campaign)  But that’s just an aside to my rant (hey, it’s my rant and if I want to go off on tangents I will   )

The article was written by an American about the American school system as he saw it.  As far as I am aware  the bloke who went and looked at the Prussian system started the mass American school system didn’t come over to the UK and start ours.  In fact I’d go as far as to say we weren’t on good relations with those darned Yankees at that point what with them just having done that big tea party over at Boston and all that.  So i’m not entirely sure what relevence bandying this round has for UK home edders but that’s not really the point, the point is that the reason the Prussian system was so awful (and the German system is still pretty awful) was that children’s parents were threatened with death or their children being taken away if they did not comply.  As far as I am aware that is niether the case on this side or the other side of the Atlantic.  As far as I am aware it never has been the case although I know there are a few LEA types who would like it to be so.  All mass education systems have to have some form of compliance built in, they don’t work unless everyone sits down, shuts up and does as they are told.  I know that in some of hte "alternative" types of school system ther is a lot more freedom and creativity but even in those there are rules and manners.  One does not disrupt another child’s work in a Montessori classroom, it is not polite - that "will" is "imposed" upon the children, the children are "trained" to be considerate (and no, I’m not saying that’s bad, just pointing out that it’s a form of compliance to a set of expected ideals)

So I get to my point (I think!)  The school system has an awful lot of flaws, some may not be as aparent to those who "use" the system as they are to those of us who have looked into althernatives.  As home educators we have chosen to withdraw from that system and go a different way.  I don’t think that gives us the right to compare the system to something designed to impose by fear an unthinking obedience to The State any more than we have the right to say "they don’t home educate my way so they are doing it wrong".  Because if the British school system was run on the Prussian model, non of us WOULD be home educating because the education system would have done it’s job and turned us all into tremblingly obedient serfs willing to do anything our better educated leaders dictated including sending our children to school.  And I’ve no diea why this has got up my nose so much.  but it has and I can’t find my ranty blog anymore (I think they killed it cos I forgot to rant on it often enough) so I’ve ranted publically instead.

  Supposedly these 16 Police Comments were taken off actual police car videos around the US.

# 16 "You know, stop lights don’t come any redder than the one you just went through."

# 15 "Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they’re new. They’ll stretch after you wear them a while."

# 14 "If you take your hands off the car, I’ll make your birth certificate a worthless document."

# 13 "If you run, you’ll only go to jail tired."

# 12 "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second? Because that’s the speed of the bullet that’ll be chasing you."

# 11 "You don’t know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket, huh?"

# 10 "Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don’t think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I’m the shift supervisor?"

# 9 "Warning! You want a warning? O.K., I’m warning you not to do that again or I’ll give you another ticket."

# 8 "The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?" 

# 7 "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs and step in monkey crap."

# 6 "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."

# 5 "In God we trust, all others we run through NCIC."

# 4 "How big were those ‘Just two beers’ you say you had?"

# 3 "No sir, we don’t have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we’re allowed to write as many tickets as we can."

# 2 "I’m glad to hear that Chief (of Police) Hawker is a personal friend of yours. It’s good you know someone who can post your bail."

AND THE WINNER IS….

# 1 "You didn’t think we give pretty women tickets? You’re right, we don’t. Sign here."  

I made a spreadsheet last night to work out how many stitches and so on for making socks as the only decent pattern I had was only for grown up socks.  Here’s Aprilia’s pair as made to the numbers from the spreadsheet - there’s enough of this particular yarn for at least 1 more pair the same size or maybe 2 diddy pairs (not weighted what I have left but there’s definitely a lot)  The orange isn’t *quite* that orange in real life by the way, my camera suffers from a nasty case of poetic licence - it obviously read too much romantic pontification about altering how views really are in order to serve your own ends…. (must finish essay, it’s starting to get to me…)